Scoring a Holiday Match (Mr. Match), Delancey Stewart [classic novels TXT] 📗

face relaxed into a smug little smile. “Do I?” She let her eyes rove over my own suit-clad body, and if I wasn’t mistaken, they lingered a bit on one particular area just below the belt.

“You do,” I confirmed. I cleared my throat, trying to keep hold of the control I’d only just found over my body. “You ready to surf?”

Tallulah shot me a brilliant smile, and the confidence she carried in everything she did hit me like a truck. “Yeah. Totally. Just one thing first though.” She stepped closer, her eyes never leaving mine as her hands came to rest on my chest, her palms flattening against me. She rose up on her toes, and I didn’t even have to contemplate how to respond. My own hands found her tight little waist and I bent down to meet her lips with my own.

It started sweetly, and I swear, that’s where I would have kept it. This was only our second date, after all. But Tallulah deepened the kiss, her lips parting and her tongue teasing my lips as her hands gripped my back. I opened my own mouth, fire flooding my veins as she wrapped one of her legs around my waist and I felt her other hand drop to my ass.

Holy mother of penguins.

Tallulah was tiny, but she was like a hurricane inside a flask. Kissing her was like unleashing a tidal wave, and when her other leg wrapped my waist and I held her against me, her hot little body pressed against mine, I had wild thoughts slamming through my mind uncontrollably. I wanted to possess her, claim her, drop to the sand and make her mine. For a moment, holding all that power and energy in my arms, I believed I might be the strongest man in the universe, able to capture an actual force of nature and make it my own.

And then she released me, stepped away and gave me that brilliant smile. “Let’s surf, Noah.”

Shit.

Now my package was completely evident through the fabric of my suit, and I stepped behind one of the boards to give myself a chance to calm down. “Yeah. Okay.”

I showed her the board I’d brought for her, and we practiced the paddling stance and the pop up there on the sand. She was a quick study, and her years of workouts definitely showed. After a few minutes, she laid down on her board on the beach and looked up at me, shielding her eyes from the bright sun with a hand.

“Noah. If I wanted to surf in the sand, I could’ve taught myself. When do we get in the water?”

“Now,” I told her.

She leapt to her feet with a wild grin on her face and hooted, scooping up her board. It was comical—she was so small compared to the longboard I’d brought for her, but she hustled it out to where the water was waist deep. She leapt on and began paddling out, and it took me some effort to catch her. We went out to the whitewater, Tallulah gazing longingly behind us where the bigger waves were breaking.

“We practice up here where we’re not going to get tumbled,” I told her.

“In the baby waves?” She sounded disappointed and actually made her face into a comical frown. I was learning that Tallulah liked a challenge, and I wasn’t surprised by this discovery at all.

“Master the baby waves, and we’ll go out to catch them at the break.”

“Done.” She had no fear, no doubt. I wondered if she approached everything this way.

Within a half hour, we were padding out deeper, past the breaking waves. They weren’t big today, but there were a few other guys out and they were big enough to give you a roll. Still, I was pretty sure Tallulah was ready.

As we sat, waiting for the next set to roll in, I watched her. She was smiling brightly, her eyes squinting against the sun, but her gaze catching mine repeatedly, and every time it did, one word seemed to rise to the surface of my emotions: Joy. Tallulah knew how to be happy—and while my own life hadn’t exactly been a struggle, there was something so attractive about her open optimism and wonder. I wanted to stay close to it, see if I could absorb some of it, hold it near.

“This one?” she asked, pointing to a swell that looked promising.

“Good eye,” I told her, and we both flipped to our stomachs and began paddling in advance of the wave that was forming just behind us. “Go, go, go!” I called to her as the water began to lift just behind us. Surfing was about timing. It was about balance, too, but that was once you got up. Catching waves took a good eye and exactly the right amount of speed and momentum to bring you to the right place to catch the swell. Too much, and the wave would crash over you. Not fun. Too little, and you’d miss that rush of power, and the thing would just lift you up and then gently set you back down as it rolled on toward the shore.

But we timed this one perfectly, and as the energy of the wave caught the back of our boards, I watched as Tallulah’s body tensed and then popped up, exactly as she’d done on the beach. I did the same, and for a glorious few seconds, we were riding, side by side under the incredible San Diego sun with the sea at our feet.

And then Tallulah lost her balance. I watched as she flipped off the side of her board, and the wave crushed her, flipping her board and sending it beneath the frenzied churn of the water. I turned my own board out of the wave, and started scanning for her off the backside.

Getting rolled was disorienting, and sometimes it was hard to know which way was up, was air, was safe. And when your board got sent down with you,